Bedtime Facts (152/365)

Japan saved 17,000 Jewish refugees prior to WW II who could not find refuge in the West

Western attitudes toward Jewish people trying to flee Germany stripping its Jews of civic rights on the eve of the Holocaust were largely indifferent and bordering on negative partly because of Britain controlled Palestine at the time and did not want European Jews fleeing into Palestine en masse because of the potential trouble with the local Arabs.

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U.S. Senator Boxer meeting Yukiko Sugihara, the wife of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat posted in Lithuania who wrote visas for 2000 Polish Jews allowing them to enter Japan until August 1940.

Despite intense Nazi pressure, the Japanese people and the Japanese government had a very different attitude. Thousands of Jewish refugees - up to 17,000 until mid-1939 - were admitted to Kobe where they were warmly welcomed by the local people. The Japanese government had reasons to win the sympathies of the Jewish people all over the world, particularly in the United States. Many high-ranking members of the Japanese government believed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian Czarist concoction of hateful propaganda intended to depict Jews as users of vast economic power and puppeteers of the world. This belief was boosted by the fact that the Japanese had been able to secure loans from a Jewish-American banker by the name Jacob Schiff who had provided them perhaps in reaction to antisemitism prevalent in Russian during the Russo-Japanese war in 1904. The Japanese government believed that by showing kindness to the Jewish refugees they could untap vast reserves of Jewish economic power and get influencial Jews in president Roosevelt's circle persuade him to relieve sanctions imposed against the US because of Japan's aggressive policies in Manchuria and China. The Japanese were also interested in settling the European Jews in occupied Manchuria to create "an intelligent and industrious middle class" for it.

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